The Era of “Influencers”: What You Need to Know About High Profile Reports

At SMI Aware, we discover and preserve social media evidence. Some cases are complicated, and some are straightforward. In all, our process remains the same: analysis, data discovery, data preservation, and finally, a report of our findings to our client.

But what about those subjects with a high number of followers and content output? For subjects with multiple accounts due to their status? These are high-profile individuals. While our process generally remains the same, cases involving high-profile individuals require more research and analysis to get to the requested data for our client. Here’s what you need to know about cases involving high-profile individuals.

Who is considered a high-profile individual?

Typically, high-profile individuals are those who have an extensive social media presence. They could be celebrities or politicians, or even online influencers who have gained tens of thousands of followers through their content. These individuals are considered high-profile because of their status, but also because of the sheer volume of content that needs to be filtered through to extract relevant data.

What makes a high-profile individual different?

Aside from their status, high-profile individuals tend to have multiple social media accounts, many times on the same platform. For example, they may have a Facebook page for fans as well as a personal Facebook page to connect with their friends and family. Because of their high follower count across platforms, these individuals create more content than average social media users. Additionally, high-profile individuals may have multiple aliases, or choose to not go by their legal name as part of their “celebrity,” so personal details may be harder to obtain. As a result, a more robust search from our in-house analysts is required to identify relevant information.

How does our analysis differ?

As part of our process we export all relevant evidence that is found, but with a high-profile individual, this could take a little more time. Take, for instance, a popular YouTube blogger. This YouTube personality may have countless videos, all of which will need to be watched by an SMI Aware analyst to find relevant information, resulting in many hours of data analysis.

Our analysts will also take the time to look at the deep web for evidence. As the exclamation of fake news continues, it’s important for our analysts to filter through all web results to ensure the sites referencing the subject are reputable and display valid and valuable information.

Given these complexities, our analysts will work as a team, but a single analyst will be assigned to the case to carry it from the beginning to the end. It’s important for that analyst to understand the case and the subject to avoid redundancy while keeping the search thread going.

Given that there are more than 160 existing social media platforms and a high-profile individual may have active accounts on many of them, with aliases, name changes, secret profiles and more, one can understand the depth of the search required when a high-profile individual is the subject of an investigation. Choosing to conduct these searches in-house may create a crunch for time, putting a strain on your case and leading to oversight of crucial information.

Partnering with our team of expert analysts will help you overcome these challenges, and ultimately achieve more wins in court.

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